Shouts From Down Under

The good old disease...

Nostalgia! A Mental Disease. Well that's what the Swiss guy called Johannes Hofer thought. Perhaps he was on the right track. Whatever it really is, it's heady stuff if you can harness the effect in a novel. Yes and in songs, screenplays, and especially in sales pitch. Beware this scourge on modern society. It's closer to home than you think!

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/2013/07/10/the-rehabilitatio...

Nostalgia is a feeling that I have spent hours trying to nut out. I've tried to analyse what it really is about. This feeling of missing days gone by, a strong sort of emotional attachment to objects, history, our past eras, family memories, hometown, Mother country. Whatever it is, I can't fathom what it's use is, other than to sell stuff from the past, cause us to be sad thinking of perhaps "the good old days" that didn't exist.
I mean, it's not all bad is it? If we don't get obsessed with the past as being better than now or the future, then I guess it doesn't matter. It is probably even a good feeling.

But nostalgia is something impossible to really satisfy. We CANNOT go back into the past. There is no way to rewind time and live those happier times again. As much as we might desire it, we won't get to eat candy apples, ride on the merry-go-round and eat fairy floss, and then sit in the grandstand watching the equestrian events, and then the fireworks. Not as that child falling asleep on our parent's laps we won't.
If we are lucky, as Grandparents we might experience something similar through the grand kids eyes. But don't kid yourself. It's never the same in my experience. Yes it's good to see their faces lit up or whatever. But now is a different era. Children are growing up in a different world. Some don't want the same "cute treats" that we thought were so great. To them it's all, "yeah Dad, whateverrrr." And I do understand that.

I do know some kids, even our daughter, who would LOVE to travel back through the impossible matrix of space time and "own a Chevy Impala & cruise across America in it, singing Me and Bobby McGee" Yes, seriously, she wants to do that. And we don't even live in America. Maybe she watches too many movies and thinks life is so rosy and great, driving along in a Chevy hotrod, wind in ya hair n singing folksy songs, sucking on a joint. Who am I to pooh pooh her dream anyway?

Or was life squeaky clean and somehow innocent, pure and most DESIRABLE back then? It is if you have ever read the novel by Richard Matheson called Bid Time Return or watched the screenplay - Somewhere in Time
In this movie, the feeling of nostalgia is overwhelming. I have never forgotten how devastating the loss in the story. This screenplay was not a success when it was first released. Only later did it become famous, mostly from the attention of the many fans it engendered.
It is beyond me how people didn't "get" it first time. Then to add to the historical, nostalgic spookiness, the wistful romance, the excruciating torture of true love soul mates torn asunder forever, was that the lead character was played by Christopher Reeves, the Superman guy. In this movie he's still walking around on two legs. But of course he had an accident and was then in a wheelchair. He has passed away since then as you'd no doubt already know.
I just find this whole novel, screenplay and aftermath goosebumpilly haunting and unbearably nostalgic, to the extent of being painful even years afterwards. And yet what gives folks? What is going on? Nostalgia was created from stuff that never existed. It is a fiction story. A movie. Based on real people maybe.

Nostalgia. A very strange thing.

For some, nostalgia is like humour. It goes straight over some people's head.

When I heard the The Seekers' song, "When The Carnival Is Over" for the first time, I was instantly in a world of nostalgia and yet the era that song was written about was before I was born or only a baby. Nostalgia is a strange feeling. I feel there is strong evidence of excellent writing skills, whether a story or song, that can conjure up bucket loads of nostalgia in the reader's / listener's head.

Link to song..

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nze8B39OB0k

A Dying Breed; the Tasmanian horror film about a missing American tourist and the local lingering convict "tradition" or cannibalism. Surely this will transport some convict era ancestors back to the good old days when every body had a different taste...?

Maybe references to Cannibalism really are in bad taste.

Sparky